Trapped in a world he is not designed to cope with, Dave-El (the true Kryptonian name of alleged Earth creature David Long) writes about comics, Doctor Who, politics and whatever damned thing pops into his unbalanced mind.

Friday, September 11, 2015

Summer, Bloody Summer

So, summer.

Why is this still a thing?

Around the environs of my Fortress of Ineptitude, the weather has been not only hot but humid as well. I don't like being hot but I care even less for being moist.

Yes, officially summer is still on the calendar and will be for another couple of weeks but still. My daughter's back in school. She should be waiting for her bus in a cool crisp morning, not when the air is as hot, damp and unappealing as Chris Christie's boxer shorts.

This has not been a great summer and I'm anxious to see it go away. On a personal level, it was not a really bad summer. Yes, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer but surgery and radiation treatments have marked "fini" to that problem. (Now there are only 137 other problems for her to cope with.) The fact that I had to make frequent road trips to help with getting her to her treatments was more than a bit tiring physically and mentally but on the plus side, I got to see more of mom than I usually do and on a few of those trips, my daughter was along as a co-pilot which made those journeys seem less long and less stressful.

Still, it seems there was so much I wanted to accomplish this summer that have, once more, fallen by the wayside. Maybe fall will be more kind to my goals.

On a larger scale and by "larger" I mean "national", this is a summer best left in the rear view mirror. Damn, too many people died from gun violence this summer. The women at the movie theater in Louisiana, the Marines at the recruitment office in Kentucky, the churchgoers in Charleston, the journalists killed on camera in Virginia, the police officers killed in Texas and Illinois. And that's just off the top of my head.

Click here for a story from this past weekend on the killings in Chicago including 8 homicides in one day. This is an untenable situation. But discussions of what can be done gets bogged down in the details.

Perhaps if we had stronger gun laws to keep guns out of the hands of bad people?

No, we need better mental health programs to keep crazy people off the streets.

No, the answer is we need better economic opportunities for communities where hopelessness gives way to crime.

No, we don't need to coddle people. Get criminals and thugs in the prisons where they belong.

No, we need to make sure everyone has access to a good education so people won't turn into criminals and thugs.

I have an idea: why don't we do ALL that shit? Yeah, it would be expensive as hell but are the costs of such endeavors worth more than the lives that are lost every single damn day to violence?

So that's one takeaway from this summer of 2015.

On the plus side, gas is real cheap. So, that's a good thing.

Summer, bloody summer. Don't let the front door hit you on the way out.